In the World

Ten years ago, I lived in San Francisco. I was thinking up brand names for an advertising company, composing “logical reasoning” questions for the G.R.E., and trying to write a novel. The advertising company paid by the hour, although it never used a single brand name that I came up with. The Educational Testing Service paid by the question, and it used about half the questions I sent—that’s how logical I was at the time. The novel didn’t pay at all. In general, my relationship with the worlds of ideas and commerce was marked by obscurity.

I was still asleep on September 11th when my mother called from New York. For the next few days, like everyone else, I watched the footage over and over. My boyfriend and I disagreed about the cause of the attacks: despair (me) versus money (him). Like most of our arguments in those days, this one was actually over how you’re supposed to live your life—over what it’s really all about.

On September 13th, I went for a long run to think things over. The sun dropped behind the ocean. In the thickening murk, I tripped on a plastic barrier, designed, I later learned, to protect the Golden Gate Bridge from terrorists. I spent the next two hours in an E.R. waiting room, watching news clips of bodies being excavated from the smoldering rubble. I thought I’d broken my wrist, but the technicians X-rayed it and it wasn’t broken. Then they X-rayed my arm, and it wasn’t broken, either. I said I was pretty sure something had been broken, so they X-rayed my elbow, which really was broken. It was only slightly satisfying to finally be right about something.

Riding the bus home, I thought about the ocean at the end of the street—the black expanse stretching all the way to Japan. Never had I felt more in the dark. I didn’t know my own arm from my elbow. I didn’t know whether the problem was oil or religion or something else. I didn’t know what counted as logic or what counted as a novel. What was I doing out there, at the edge of the world?

In the decade since the attacks, some things got better, and some got worse. I became a writer. Life gradually became less a search for meaning than a process of optimization: how to put this sentence the best way in the fewest words, how to choose the right things to buy at the supermarket and pay for them in the fastest-moving line, what to do and ingest in order to keep from getting sick or depressed, without running out of money or neglecting your parents.

Last year, I got a job offer in Istanbul. “At least you’ll be in the world,” a friend observed. “As opposed to in America.” I remembered then how after 9/11 people had said that America was now part of the rest of the world. The feeling hadn’t lasted. Now I live in a city where Starbucks hasn’t fully caught on. People drink a lot of tea, and it’s not so surprising to see a clubfooted person in a teahouse. Sometimes I meet up with my cousin, who grew up in a working-class family in Adana. She never fails to mention a certain Eid al-Adha, more than twenty years ago, when my parents wouldn’t let me see the ram being slaughtered. She’s still annoyed that I was so cosseted, and I’m still embarrassed about it. It was Eid al-Adha again when I arrived in Istanbul last fall. Reading the public-service notices—you can’t kill a ram in your back yard anymore; you have to go somewhere with a decent drainage system, either a slaughterhouse or a car wash—I suddenly wondered: Is that why I came back? To see the ram slaughtered?

If you find that you’ve accidentally checked out from the human condition, as I seemed to have done in the years since 2001, can you check in again by moving to an earlier point in late-stage capitalism—to a country where you can still commonly see correctable congenital malformations, or a car wash converted to a holy abattoir? Is seeing such things a form of engagement, or a form of vampirism? Was life more satisfying in the old days, either despite or because of the less advanced state of technology and social justice?

I grew up thinking that it was immoral to idealize the past, because in the past there was slavery and no penicillin. Later, I went to graduate school and read Marxists, people who said that the happiest civilizations had existed in the age of Homer, when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths; that post-Soviet people were depressed because nobody talked to his neighbors anymore; that catastrophes liberate people from the tyranny of home improvements and self-interest.

Are things getting better or worse? Even in the most material sense, it’s hard to tell. In Turkey over the past year, both the growth rate and the unemployment rate have exceeded ten per cent. In June, thirty-six pro-Kurdish candidates won seats in parliament—but one was disqualified by the election board, and five others are under arrest. A monument to Turkish-Armenian friendship in Kars was recently dismantled, after the Prime Minister called it a monstrosity. It’s going to be replaced by a monument to cheese.

I like to think that I know more now than I did ten years ago. But one thing I’ve learned is that the path to understanding isn’t a well-lit staircase. When something hugely destabilizing happens in the world, that’s when the truth, a giant animal hiding in the dark, just gave away its hand. That’s when you have to seize your advantage and pursue it. For years, I didn’t think I’d ever want to recapture anything I felt in 2001, least of all that sense of free fall and obscurity. But when I started looking for it again it was right where I’d left it. ♦